Many obscure, enigmatic and buried symbols enrich children’s picture books, poetry, and fiction. Secrets, nonsense, allegory, symbols, ciphers, dreams, or “things buried” may be central to a story’s theme or may be hidden in the text or the book design itself, discovered not only by doing multiple readings, but also by upside down and forwards and backwards readings. Is there a special relationship, for instance, between such concepts as “secrets” and “dream” and children’s literature? Does children’s and/or young adult literature conceal “secret” knowledge? This panel invites papers that explore these topics through a variety of critical theoretical lenses as well as formalistic readings.